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Monday, December 30, 2013

Road Trip Chapter 4

(I had hoped to finish posting this series before the new year. Nano got in the way of editing/fixing stuff so the rest will go up in January -- it is already almost all posted on tumblr, so there is that, and is mostly all edited/fixed by now though I suspect I will catch the odd typo/tense error for some time.)4.
Stories & Lies

I leave Jay in the
back seat with instructions to rest; he curls up against the door and
is out cold moments later. From the look of the fast food containers
in the front neatly filled with other bottles and candy wrappers he’s
gone through a staggering amount of food but needed no urging to
sleep. I try not to worry about it as Charlie taps the wheel
carefully and waits.

“Human vision is
limited; his vision isn’t human. He can see colours we can’t,
probably because a good number of Others use camouflage techniques
here, if out where they’re from. It’s kin to how fish see a lot
more than people do.”

“So if I had
tried to see whatever that man was, I’d have been noticed?”

“Yes. I probably
would have as well; for him it’s entirely normal to see such
things.” I let out a breath and nudged the bond, but Jay seemed
entirely asleep. “He had to use a lot of esses to explain it – or
fail to, really, but he hates saying them to anyone except me.”

“He hates being
reminded of how weak he is. Fine. I get that.” I say nothing and
her gaze flicks over to me. “What? He told me he was worried his
binding you meant I’d hate him: I said it wasn’t like that and
things are okay, and now you’re going to tell me I’m wrong.
Because you are the magician.”

“Which means
things aren’t okay?” Charlie says nothing in turn, focusing on
the road. “He’s not human. He looks it, yes, and he’s learning
to act it, but I imagine he can probably see bindings as easily as
we’d see sunlight but we don’t have the language to describe it.”

“Huh.”

“That was a
weighted grunt,” I say, as seriously as Jay would.

It wins a ghost of
a smile. “I’m trying to get this straight in my head. Shadows
attack us, and because of that we’re drive across the country with
Jay to meet another magician, partially because he’s a weird little
shit but mostly because you have some creatures from outside the
universe pissed off at you.”

“Broadly, yes.”

“Why the car?
You’re a magician.”

“Magic is need
and desire, as I’ve said before. Our need to meet Leo in Washington
State isn’t great enough to risk bending space and time, not when
doing so weakens the walls between the worlds. and allow Others into
this world that lack the power to get in alone. Viruses. Plagues.”

“Not knowingly. A
magician who didn’t know of cars and the like
could make gateways with almost no cost: it’s about knowledge as
much as anything else.”

“Another reason most magicians don’t use the internet?”

“It’s not a
question of ignorance being power, but more than knowledge can
constrain magic if improperly applied. I think it’s one reason few
older people become magicians and why most magicians tend to be
limited: a magician who is able to do anything must, in the end, do
nothing.”

“Like Mary-Lee,”
she says slowly.

“I don’t know.
She had someone alter my drink in the bar; I’m certain it wasn’t
her, but why she wanted to speak to you and Jay and to what end I’ve
no idea. You are a god-eater with a god inside them, Charlie:
that isn’t too usual either.”

“And we’ve
never ran into one we couldn’t see before. Because we couldn’t
see them,” she says before I can say it, “but also because of
reasons, right?’“

“You are a
god-eater: it only made sense to try and keep you away from gods. For
their sake and yours. The man at the automotive shop was probably an
avatar, a human imbued with some of the gods power. Any place
because care about deeply can manifest a god, which protects and
limits it at the same time. Your business won’t expand but neither
is it likely to fall victim to weird acts you’ll never explain to
insurance or basic threats like recessions. Assuming one manages to
call and manifest the right sort of god, of course. I did try and
keep us eating in chain restaurants to avoid incidents.”

“And you never
told me.”

“That did seem a
way to help avoid incidents, yes.” Charlie looks back at the road
at that, the god a flash of anger in her eyes for a moment despite an
attempt at steadied calm, her anger a wash of warmth that bubbles
through the car. “If I had told you, would you haver avoided gods?”

“That’s not the
point: it was my choice to make.”

“No. You exist as
you are now because of a working I did, Charlie. Magic doesn’t
allow me to evade the responsibility of that while we travel together
and I’d rather you didn’t leave.” I let out a breath. “I’ve
done enough harm in my life without adding more if I can avoid it.”

“Magic as a guilt
trip, huh? ’Magic is not power’, and all the stuff?”

“Yes. Consider it
like balancing a pendulum. So far you’ve been one for my plus
column.”

She snorts at that
but does relax a little. “And Jay?”

“No idea at all.
I’m trying not to think about that too hard.” I snag a pop and
chocolate bar to eat. “To work magic, one must shape reality to
one’s will. Become the very thing you change, so that there is no
point where it ends and you do not begin. Some magicians never
recover from that, from what it means, from what we are. I
have seen too much, too clearly, to be wise, but it is easy to
mistake wisdom for knowledge when you know more than others do. And
magicians often do, in matters that concern us.”

“That’s a
marginally better excuse for being an ass than most guys have,” she
says, but her smile has less edges to it now. “So I could leave and
really screw you up, huh?”

“How can leaving
not harm another?” I offer, not meaning to wound, knowing it can’t
help but do so. “Sometimes staying harms more, it is true, but it
is hard to know which is worse even for a magician. If you can see
deeper into someone than they themselves can, knowing what they
desire and what they need becomes hard to understand at times.”

I let out a breath.
“I spent some time in a small town on the outer edges of Vegas not
long after the great Working Leo and I helped with. As the only
survivors, we figured we should best lie low and major centres are a
good way to vanish for anyone. Problem was that local drug lords had
been vanishing for a good month before I arrived. It made the papers,
mostly in a ’well, the police are looking into it, mostly to hand
out civic awards’ sense. They’d all been out seeking homes for
grow ups, hideaways and the like and vanished without a trace.

I helped myself to
another pop. “So I went into Vegas and bent chance in my favour,
returned in a suit and with a small fortune to begin renting places I
could sublease to others. Wave around money, pay in cash, get cheaper
deals. The end result was cheap rent for people and a small profit
going back to the casino I’d made a deal with. It took almost five
days to find a real estate agent who wasn’t human – it might be
easier now, of course. It looked female, had a smile so bright it
could only be fake and didn’t fool me.

“I fooled it,
enough to be taken to a home on the outskirts of anything that ate
people. Another Other, unable to leave the building it had become.
The result of some poor banishing or attempted return outside the
universe. The weaker one brought it nasty people as food so it didn’t
call non-nasty people to it.”

“So they’re
still there?” Charlie asks as she finishes her cigarette.

“I banished both,
returned the money I’d acquired to the casino and the business
itself to a family fallen on hard times. The building has no concern
over who it ate, and the weaker Other wanted to return home but
couldn’t alone. It turned out better than it could have.”

“They were
helping the community, weren’t they?”

“The real estate
agent was using the papers and rumours to find evil people to feed to
the house: it was only a matter of time before they made a mistake.
The house didn’t care who it ate, and it was only a matter of time
before the real estate agent was caught.”

“Huh.” She
peels open one of the candy bars, eyes on the road. “And you had to
make that kind of judgement call alone?”

“One isn’t
alive if one doesn’t make judgement calls,” I offer with a smile,
“and knowing when to alter them and why is as important as making
them. Now I would probably have kept them in the world and bound
them: then I did what was basically reflex for a magician, even if it
was for the right reasons.”

“Huh.” She
drives for a good minute in silence, the back roads mostly empty
except for a few trucks passing us that don’t give our car a second
look, though one guy does bellow at us to find a satnav.

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“You have
stories, I imagine. Everyone does.”

She pauses. “I
was at a party once with a guy I knew who slipped LSD into random
drinks. Richard was his name: Dick the dick we called him, for a lot
of good reasons including that. One kid named Tyrone ended up
screaming about mirrors and leapt off the roof of the house. Ended up
in the hospital far as I know. Before I met you, I’d have called it
the weirdest thing I’d seen, a serious spazz-out.”

I don’t point out
Tyrone was probably right about mirrors or that her pause probably
meant some buried memory. “I meant about you, Charlie.”

She lights a
cigarette and takes a deep drag of it. “I was eight years old when
I first brought my mom a steaming pot of coffee to wake her up in the
morning. You know functioning alcoholics: fuck that noise. Mom didn’t
function at all most of the time, near as I could tell. Dad did
sales. Travelled,” she says, giving the word a sharp weight.

I met her dad in a
coffee shop. I don’t add to it.

“I think he loved
her. Asked myself that a lot, once I figured things out. Why else
would a gay man marry a woman if he didn’t love her?”

There is cruelty in
telling people truths they know; I don’t point out nothing is that
simple.

“By the time I
realized what was going on, mom didn’t. Maybe she never wanted to.
She’d had to give up drink after DT hit and dad’s money couldn’t
cover for something she did at some event. So she fell into valium,
stuff like that. Medicate the world to happiness, shit like that. Mom
fell apart, dad held the family together. It was normal enough, from
what my friends said, though for most of them it was therapists that
held their families together.” She lets out a smoke ring. “That
and prenups.”

“And yet you
smoke,” I say.

“Fuck yeah.
Everyone needs a crutch; this is mine. Less expensive than most
others. You drink.”

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”